A Cognitive Study On The Meaning Construction Of Spring Festival Short Messages

In recent years, sending short messages has become one of the main ways forfestival greetings and expressing blessings. Spring festival short message blessing is sopopular as it has developed quickly as a fashionable cultural phenomenon in modernsociety.Though the spring festival short messages are short, their rich content and vividlinguistic expressions have attracted many researchers to study. Previous studies mainlyfocus on their language characteristics and discourse structure. Few have tried to studythem from the perspective of cognition. With the development of cognitive linguistics,the conceptual blending theory was put forward by Fauconnier based on the mentalspace theory. The blending theory constructs a conceptual blending network throughsuch conceptual elements as input spaces, generic space, blended space, emergentstructure, mapping, projection and compression of vital relations etc, thus explaining themechanism of meaning construction. This conceptual blending theory provides us a newperspective to do research on spring festival short messages.200spring festival blessing short messages are selected for this study. The methodsI use are both qualitative and quantitative. First,200spring festival blessing shortmessages are divided into different types in a traditional way. And a statictical analysisis employed to find out the most frequently chosen conceptual elements for mentalspace construction and blending. Then, the messages are classified according toconceptual blending networks. Next, the vital relations in compression for mental spaceconstruction and blending are investigated. Finally, a qualitative analysis of the springfestival blessing short messages based on conceptual blending networks is done. Theresults can be summed up as follows:(1) The conceptual elements related to health,career, wealth, fortune, friendship, family life, love and traditional activities andscenarios are frequently used for constructing mental space and blending in springfestival short messages;(2) Five types of spring festival short messages are discovered,and the simplex network short messagess are the most frequently used;(3) Because ofthe characteristics of spring festival short messages, vital relations of Change, Identity, Intentionality and Time and Space are mostly common in compression to realize themeaning constrution.